Freeform

Freeform has been selected by the Department of War's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) for its 10ⁿ program, a national effort to produce flight-qualified space hardware at the speed and volume the mission now demands. "Dual-use" describes one technology built to serve both commercial industry and national defense. Freeform was built that way from the start. We run one advanced system for every customer we serve, commercial or government, at a single standard of quality. We already produce mission-critical parts for the most demanding hardware companies in the world. Under this agreement, that same capability goes to work for America's space and defense forces, scaled through our AI-native Skyfall platform toward production rates of hundreds of units a month and thousands a year. Erik Palitsch, our founder and CEO: "We built our manufacturing systems to deliver commercial production capabilities for the toughest customers in the world. DIU saw where manufacturing has to go and came to the company already there." Proud to put that capability in the hands of the people building and defending the frontier. Link in comments to read more! #DualUse #DefenseTech #AdvancedManufacturing #PhysicalAI #SpaceIndustrialBase

There's a circuit board here at Freeform nicknamed "Picasso." It's Senior Electrical Engineer Min Kim's engineering genius, on full display. The board is 17 inches wide, sitting at the center of our high-performance compute cards. Every port talks to a different laser, and it doesn't scale the way you'd expect: "What sets Freeform apart is that we're using far more lasers than anyone else in the industry right now... this enables up to 40 lasers. It doesn't scale linearly; it kind of scales exponentially because now there's interactions between every other laser. The more you scale, the more complex it gets, but it also lets us do things a lot faster." Speed is the whole point: "That's what allows us to print parts within hours, compared to other companies that are doing it in days or weeks." None of this hardware comes off the shelf, from custom sensors to high performance compute cards. Freeform builds in-house: "We do all of that work in house... we're kind of forced to make our own custom hardware because we need to push past what off-the-shelf devices can offer us." A design this complex can't live in one discipline: "This design sits at the heart of what we do... it touches every discipline. So, we do have to work with every team to make sure that this board is doing exactly what it needs to." That's the pattern at Freeform: electrical, mechanical, software, controls - all in the same room, on the same problem, because the hardest problems live at the boundary between disciplines. This is what we mean when we say Freeform is where the best engineers come to do the best work of their careers. - Min Kim, Senior Electrical Engineer, Freeform #Engineering #ElectricalEngineering #AdditiveManufacturing #Hardware #Freeform

There's a circuit board here at Freeform nicknamed "Picasso." It's Senior Electrical Engineer Min Kim's engineering genius, on full display. The board is 17 inches wide, sitting at the center of our high-performance compute cards. Every port talks to a different laser, and it doesn't scale the way you'd expect: "What sets Freeform apart is that we're using far more lasers than anyone else in the industry right now... this enables up to 40 lasers. It doesn't scale linearly; it kind of scales exponentially because now there's interactions between every other laser. The more you scale, the more complex it gets, but it also lets us do things a lot faster." Speed is the whole point: "That's what allows us to print parts within hours, compared to other companies that are doing it in days or weeks." None of this hardware comes off the shelf, from custom sensors to high performance compute cards. Freeform builds in-house: "We do all of that work in house... we're kind of forced to make our own custom hardware because we need to push past what off-the-shelf devices can offer us." A design this complex can't live in one discipline: "This design sits at the heart of what we do... it touches every discipline. So, we do have to work with every team to make sure that this board is doing exactly what it needs to." That's the pattern at Freeform: electrical, mechanical, software, controls - all in the same room, on the same problem, because the hardest problems live at the boundary between disciplines. This is what we mean when we say Freeform is where the best engineers come to do the best work of their careers. - Min Kim, Senior Electrical Engineer, Freeform #Engineering #ElectricalEngineering #AdditiveManufacturing #Hardware #Freeform

50,000 frames per second. That's the rate at which data comes off our printers at Freeform - every laser pass, every micron of material, captured in real time. Our Chief Scientific Officer, Tasso Lappas, put it simply: "We are actually looking at data coming off the printer at literally 50,000 frames a second." Most companies working in physical AI settle for simulated data, or scraps of legacy data. We knew that wasn’t good enough. "We knew that if we didn't have real physical data, no real machine learning could apply." So we built a platform that doesn't just print - it observes and it corrects. As the lasers move, we're rendering what's happening inside the metal, live: "As the lasers are printing, I can render in real time the data that is showing me what is actually happening inside the metal. This we couldn't do a few years ago." That real-time visibility is what makes closed-loop control possible - not control after the fact, but control at the speed of the process itself: "Our data models and our controls are enabling our predictive models by essentially becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you can control the process at all the stages correctly, then your predictive models are accurate." This is the engineering underneath everything we build: "No one can do this. To do this, you need the platform to gather the data." High-speed edge compute. Real physical data. A closed loop fast enough to control metal at the micron level, in real time. That's the platform we built. — Tasso Lappas, Chief Scientific Officer, Freeform #AdditiveManufacturing #PhysicalAI #Manufacturing #Engineering 

There's never been a better time to be a frontier hardware company because of Freeform. Advanced hardware companies are scaling at rates we've never seen before. The bottleneck isn't the idea anymore, it's turning that idea into thousands of flawless, complex parts at speed, with a guarantee of quality. Aaron Littlejohn, our Senior Manager of Production, breaks down why manufacturing as a service is built for exactly this. We take on the complexity of mass-producing essential parts for the most advanced hardware companies, so scaling production stops being the hard part. Just focus on the breakthrough, and we'll make sure it ships. #AdvancedManufacturing #PhysicalAI #FrontierTech #ManufacturingAsAService #Hardware #Aerospace #Defense #Robotics #Innovation #FreeformFuture

There's a kind of person who can't walk past a hard problem. Not because they have to solve it. Because they need to. That's the difference between a job and a craft. Real engineering isn't about the title on the door or the box getting checked. It's the pull toward something that doesn't exist yet, and the refusal to leave it half solved. The best builders we know would rather chase down the root cause than call it good enough. That instinct is rare. It's also the only thing that actually moves hard engineering forward. We built this place for people who have it. These are some of the people who build it. Join us. https://lnkd.in/gNjdjN8p #engineering #additivemanufacturing #frontiertech

Another month, another exceptional wave of new hires joining Freeform! These five new engineers hail from Cornell, UPenn, and MIT, plus a seasoned people ops leader from Second Order Effects - as we keep building the team that builds the machines that build the machines. ⚙️Jonas H., Mechanical Engineer, University of Pennsylvania ⚙️Victor Lancon, Mechanical Engineer, Cornell University ⚙️Joey Nadol, Mechanical Engineer, Cornell University 🏭Summer Moulder, Manufacturing Process Engineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ⚡Kelvin Resch, Electrical Engineer, Cornell University 🤝Samantha Briggs, Sr People Operations Business Partner, Second Order Effects Welcome to the team!

Freeform is an engineering company before it's anything else. We'd rather build the thing than talk about it, and we let the work speak for itself. Skyfall is that mentality fully unleashed. Brilliant people, a work ethic most companies only claim to have, and months of refusing to settle, all poured into one machine. Whatever you think you know about us, just wait. The game is about to change. #skyfall Grady Wagner For those who want to build the frontier: https://lnkd.in/gNjdjN8p

"There's a lot of talk about reindustrializing and we will play a role in that, but the idea that I push back on is rebuilding factories. There won't be a big warehouse with operators and punch cards. Customers will upload a part and everything downstream will be manufactured autonomously within the next 12 months." - Erik Palitsch in the Los Angeles Times This is the shift we're building toward at Freeform. Not a bigger version of the old factory, a different machine entirely, one that learns from every part it forms. The result is a factory that lets the most ambitious hardware companies scale from one part to thousands, without designing around the limits of how things have always been made. #Reindustrialization #AdvancedManufacturing #PhysicalAI #HardTech #MadeInAmerica https://lnkd.in/eSyMSZQA

Freeform just made the Los Angeles Times Top 50 Aerospace and Defense Companies in Southern California. You don't need an army of people to earn a place next to the giants. You need a small group of people who refuse to accept how things have always been made, all pointed at the same problem. The legacy industrial base could not build the parts the frontier actually needs. So we built the system that can. Physical AI runs the factory, and every part is guaranteed as it forms. The next generation of hardware is born in the factories of Freeform. There is a lot to be excited about here, but the work is just getting started. We are heads down building. If you need us, we'll be working. #engineering #advancedmanufacturing #frontiertechnology https://lnkd.in/giQsdEF9